I think Newsweek means to refer to the animal “welfare” movement in the headline, but you can see where they’re going with this.
Consider how widely humans differ in their mental abilities. A typical adult can reason, make moral choices and do many things (like voting) that animals obviously cannot do. But not all human beings are capable of reason, not all are morally responsible and not all are capable of voting. And yet we go out of our way to claim that all humans have rights. What, then, justifies our withholding at least some rights from nonhuman animals?
Like in Animal Liberation, Singer makes a case for animal rights by pointing to the rights we grant to the human who, because of age or mental disability, cannot reason or speak—a kind of homo alalus, with the retrospective sense that speech is missing, necessary for wholeness and humanity, and with the paradoxical caveat that we do see the living homo alalus—the mentally incapable and the youngest of children—as fully entitled humans possessing the qualifying humanitas.
It’s true that for some people, this is still the most compelling argument; it is the one that least disrupts the common (Western) cultural narratives and practices that sustain our oblivious lifestyles. But discussions like this one that limit themselves to arguments based on “suffering and killing” fail to question the broader and more central assumptions about human superiority, which—left obscured by pandering, or lack of consideration, or unwillingness to transform one’s own behavior—keep our (Western) society safe from the public vivisection it desperately needs.
To simply explore that paradox—that the human without logos is still considered human, is still decisively not considered an animal—is to obliterate Singer’s oversimplified argument for animal rights. There are forces—logocentrism, to highlight one of the most impervious ones—within cultural narratives that work far more insidiously and effectively than the problem of pain does. It’s not enough to go back to the Bentham quote every time one makes an argument for consideration of other animals’ suffering because, clearly (and we may see the passing of Prop 2 as evidence of this), lack of consideration of pain is not the dominant narrative working against animals.
